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This module focuses on the aims of health services, as well as how to investigate health service delivery and “diagnose” system challenges. Typically, health services are expected to deliver high quality, safe healthcare that then results in good outcomes. Taking different health system, population, and user perspectives, you will be able to appraise the different dimensions of quality and safety and how important outcomes may vary depending on one’s perspective.

By the end of the module students will be able to:  

  • Compare the different ways of conceptualising and assessing quality, safety, and outcomes of health care / provision of health services.   
  • Describe the range of health system factors influencing quality, safety, and outcomes of health services at the macro-, meso- and micro-levels of the health system.  
  • Analyse how services are delivered and what influences frontline care delivery, including organisational and human factors, and teamwork and the roles and experiences of health service users / patients.   
  • Apply a range of techniques and tools for ‘system diagnosis’ to analyse quality and safety outcomes and their determinants that enable articulation of the possible causal pathways leading to these outcomes, with an understanding that can provide the foundation for purposeful (theory informed) intervention (that feeds directly into work in Module 4 and 5).